Posts Tagged ‘group’

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Keep your Table on One Page in MS Word

Monday, January 30th, 2012

When you create large, complex documents (i.e., technical manuals, theses, etc.) you will find that you are adding tables to them. It has been my experience that most tables in these documents are not very long and can very easily fit onto one page. Having said that, it can be problematic when there is a page break smack dab in the middle of your table.

Follow the steps below to prevent such behavior:

  1. Select all rows in your table.
  2. Display the Paragraph dialog box by clicking on Format | Paragraph in version 2003 and in versions 2007-2010, click on the Home tab of your Ribbon and click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group.
  3. Be certain the Line and Page Breaks tab is selected.
  4. Select the Keep Lines Together check box.
  5. Click on OK.

Having done that, you now need to repeat the steps, with two very minor changes.

  1. First, in step one, select all the rows in your table except the last one.
  2. In step four, make sure the Keep with Next check box is selected.

This will make sure that your table stays together as a unit rather than staying with teh paragraph that follows it.

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Posted in Microsoft Office Word, Word 2003, Word 2007, Word 2010 | No Comments »

Deleting all Tab Stops in MS Word

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

A reader wrote to me recently inquiring whether there was a keyboard shortcut to delete all tab stops in her document.

Unfortunately there is no keyboard shortcut to accomplish this task. You must use the Tabs dialog box instead.

Follow the steps below to learn how:

Click CTRL + A to select your entire document.

Display the Home tab of your Ribbon.

Click the small icon at the bottom-right of the Paragraph group to display the dialog box.

Click the Tabs button at the bottom-left to display the Tabs dialog box.

Click the Clear All button.

Click OK.

In version 2003, simply click on Format | Tab | Clear All.

I have read different posts that suggest a quick way to delete tab stops is to select all the text and then click CTRL + Q. This removes all explicit paragraph formatting from your text.  While the tab stops are a paragraph format, CTRL + Q just removes any explicitly added tab stops and sets the paragraphs back to whatever formatting is defined for each paragraph’s style. So if the underly paragraph style has tab stops defined, those stops remain after CTRL + Q is clicked and not all tab stops are removed.

More importantly, you should know that when you get rid of your paragraph stops, Word’s default tab stops automatically take place. The default tab stops in MS Word are set for every half inch. You can set them to a different setting, but you cannot cleanse your document of all tabs completely. There is no method to do this.

Should you need to remove tab stops from a large number of documetns you may want to use a macro to accomplish the task for you. The macro below will remove all tab stops from all paragraphs in yoru document:

Sub TabsGone()

     ActiveDocument.Paragraphs.TabStops.ClearAll

End Sub

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Posted in Microsoft Office, Word 2007, Word 2010 | No Comments »

Working with Multiple Worksheets in MS Excel

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

Working with multiple worksheets concurrently is how MS Excel power users create and format a complex workbook with the least amount of effort expended.

Follow the steps below to make working with multiple sheets a piece of cake and you will be on your way to becoming a power user!

  •     Hold down the CTRL key as you click each tab top select multiple worksheets.
  •     To select a contiguous group of worksheets, click the first one in the group and then hold down the Shift key and click the last one in the group.
  •     To select all the worksheets in the current workbook, right-click any worksheet tab and choose Select All Sheets from the shortcut menu.
  •     To quickly make any sheet active, click its index tab; to remove a sheet from a selected group of sheets, hold down CTRL and click its tab.
  •     To remove the multiple selection and resume working with a single sheet, click any unselected sheet. If you have selected every sheet in the workbook, right-click any worksheet tab and choose Ungroup Sheets.
  •     If you have selected more than one sheet, you see the word Group in brackets in the title board, and any data you enter appears in the corresponding cells on each worksheet in the group. So, if you have grouped Sheet1, Sheet2 and Sheet3, entering text in cellA1 on Sheet1 also enters the same text in the corresponding cells on Sheet2 and Sheet3.
  •     Any choices you make such as applying a number format, affect all the grouped worksheets identically. If you are building a workbook with identically formatted sheets, you can use these techniques to quickly enter category headings, etc. along the top of each sheet.

You cannot use the Clipboard to enter data into multiple sheets concurrently. When you paste data, it only appears in the active sheet and not in any other sheets you have selected.

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Posted in Excel 2003, Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Excel | No Comments »

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